When Daniels finally surfaces, eager to share his epiphanies with an indifferent world, the novel barrels toward a gut-punch conclusion. While taking refuge in an underground cave, Daniels tunnels into a church and various businesses what he observes from the periphery of public life leaves him profoundly changed. Desperate to return to his pregnant wife, Daniels seizes an opportunity to escape police custody by fleeing into the sewer system, but soon enough, Daniels’ attachments to life above ground fall away. The Man Who Lived Underground is the blistering story of Fred Daniels, a Black man apprehended and brutally beaten by the police, who coerce him into signing a false confession for the murder of a white couple. The publication of an undiscovered novel from an American master will always make news, but in the case of The Man Who Lived Underground, the novel’s resurrection raises powerful questions about the racist forces that conspired to bury it. To this day, he continues to loom large in the American literary pantheon as a force of nature, lighting the way for writers seeking to question power and identity on the page. In all its crudeness, melodrama, and claustrophobia of vision, Richard Wright’s novel brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear, and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture.” In his many books to follow, Wright laid bare the heinous oppression and degradation Black Americans experienced, inaugurating a tradition of protest literature that would inspire Black writers for decades to come. No matter how much qualifying the book might later need, it made impossible a repetition of the old lies. Native Son, published just one year earlier, was a national sensation, with critic Irving Howe proclaiming, “The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever. Archivio Cameraphoto EpocheĪt the time he was writing The Man Who Lived Underground, Wright's star couldn't stop rising.

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